In 2020 PALS helped staff at Augsburg University build a site for their ongoing oral history projects. The site, Augorah, was created so that Augsburg students, staff, and others could easily contribute recordings, transcripts, and the required consent forms. For this project, the staff at Augsburg were able to overcome a significant barrier to encouraging faculty, students, and staff to pursue oral histories in teaching and research. This barrier is a familiar one - the amount of time and effort it can take to create an accurate transcript of an interview. The solution that worked for this project was otter.ai, a transcription generator that uses artificial intelligence. Otter.ai generates text from a recording, and, importantly, it allows a user to edit the generated document, teach the system to recognize a speaker by their voice, and export a finished transcript in a variety of file formats. It also creates keywords out of commonly used terms.
This presentation will show you how Augorah was built to support user-contributed content and how otter.ai works for transcriptions. Learning objectives will be: • Learn how a digital repository site can be set up to support user-contributed content • Learn how otter.ai can save significant time and effort in the creation of oral histories Speakers for the presentation will be Alex Kent, Digital Initiatives Librarian for PALS (www.mnpals.org), and Stewart Van Cleve, Digital Archives and Research Services Librarian for Augsburg University (archives.augsburg.edu).
